


to them, he is a mirror (to you, he is a room)

by queenofthestarrrs



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Afterlife, F/M, Ghosts, POV Ben Solo, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, That's Not How The Force Works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:27:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24655312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenofthestarrrs/pseuds/queenofthestarrrs
Summary: Ben stands in a room.Or Ben Solo drifts through an afterlife.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	to them, he is a mirror (to you, he is a room)

Sweat is pooling at his neck, on his elbows, at the back of his knees, at every crevice in his body. It’s dripping down his forehead, making his thick hair cling to the damp skin. His eyes burn from the salt in his sweat and the tears overwhelming his eyes.    
  
His hands are trembling. There is a lump in his throat that is making it difficult to breathe and swallow. His feet are burning as he digs them deeper into the sand. The pain barely registers in his head; it’s just another sensation in a brain that seems to be overstimulated, fried, unstable.    
  
Overhead, twin suns beat down unceasingly and unforgivingly. The heat comes in overwhelming waves. It gnaws at him, pushes at his chest, and clings to him like a second set of skin.    
  
Beside him, the girl clicks on her yellow lightsaber. She looks ethereal in the soft lighting, like an angel. It lights up her warm brown eyes and creates softness in her face. Life has been cruel to her, crueler than it has ever been to him - at least not in any way that he himself did not design, did not craft for himself. But she wears it well. Her heart has not been cracked open raw, not like his.    
  
She takes off for the distance. He tries to go after her. He tries to call out to her. He wills himself forward, strains against his own treacherous body, and yet he still will not move from the burnt down remains of farmland he had such a minuscule ancestral claim to. Still, the girl goes onward and onward until she disappears.

He wonders if this is the punishment of his entire family - to be endlessly tethered to the past. 

  
  


-

He is sitting in a room. 

  
It is a room that was once airy and light, a room where love grew and knew that love could exist beyond the limits of blood. It is now a room that is filled with desperation and anger and guilt.    
  
Mostly it is a room filled with fear.    


His grandfather who is not his grandfather sits down at a console and furiously types away as the red light that is only becoming brighter and brighter. He knows that this is a dying man’s confession. Ben knows that it will eventually go on to share vital information with the Rebellion that will bring the Empire to its knees, Darth Vader to his knees. This a man’s entire life work encapsulated in thirty seconds before the holistic and instant destruction of everything that he loves.    
  
Well, almost everything that he loves.    
  
His grandmother who is not his grandmother holds her stomach and stares off into the distance. She looks unseeing at a portrait of a young woman. Tears softly and silently roll down her cheeks. She shakes so violently that her chair rattles and her delicate headpiece bobbles from side to side. Ben has seen this look before, the look of a person who knows that they are not ready for death. 

Ben, also and of course, knows the young woman in the portrait. The hair, the sparkle in her eye, the warmth and defiance of her smile is something that he would know anywhere, across any lifetime. But he has never seen her when she was so young. The woman in the portrait had always been older than that and had carried a heavy weight with her, the weight of guilt. Ben wishes he would have met her before. Perhaps she would have been different. Perhaps he would have loved her less. Perhaps it would have been easier to leave her, to disappoint her. 

He closes his eyes from his unnoticed perch. Behind his eyelids, he sees the burning red light grow brighter and brighter until there is nothing left at all. 

-

This event is real. The other ones may have not been real, but he knows this is real as soon as he opens his eyes. He remembers this.    
  


He is at dinner with his father and his uncle. His mother is away, doing what needs to be done like she’s always done and seems like she always had to do. They are eating and they are laughing and Ben is characteristically quite like he always was. He never feels like there is a place for his personality at the table, and now in hindsight, he knows that there never would be - with all that he had done and would do and with his last breath would not apologize for. 

  
He is a child. He is thirteen. It is a time when his years were bigger than his head, his eyes were bigger than his stomach, and blissfully his heart was bigger than his brain. He remembers being this age and thinking that he was grown, that he was ready to carry on the legacy that had shadowed his life for his entire life. He remembers thinking that he was so mature. He remembers wondering if he was ever destined for greatness and the chilling echo at the base of his skull that whispered to him that he was not. 

He remembers the events that are to come after this, but he does not remember the thoughts that are running through his head.    
  
He looks at his uncle. 

_ You will try to kill me.  _

His head pivots almost as if it is on a pike, and he methodically reviews every feature, every line, and every scar on his father’s face.    
  
_ And I will succeed in killing you _ . 

He vomits all over himself. He doesn’t mean to, but it happens anyway. There is acid and bile in his throat and his mouth and across his lap and on his hands. He is shaking violently, with waves of nausea ceasing at his stomach. His teeth begin to chatter, and pain blossoms across his entire skull. 

His father panics and grabs a cloth. He is cleaning frantically and doing his best not to gag. His father loves him, but his father is not the best father he could have been. Ben used to be angry with him, more furious with him at each passing day. But now Ben does not blame him. Han had no role models, no one to learn from, no one to show him with the gentle tenderness he needed. It was not his fault, but he died for it anyway.    
  
His uncle is there beside him, telling gentle jokes, carefully tipping a glass of water into Ben’s parched mouth, smoothing down his unruly hair. There is a softness that he does not deserve. 

  
Tears are suddenly rushing down his cheeks. His uncle continues to rub his head and grasps his shoulder. His father looks even more panicked than he did before, furiously cleaning.    
  
“Don’t cry, kid,” his father says as he carefully washes his son’s hands with soap and water, “it happens to the best of us.”    
  
Ben only sobs harder.   
  
That’s how the story goes, Ben remembers. His family believed that he was crying out of embarrassment. He now knows that it was wrong. His memories betrayed him. It was not out of embarrassment, not really.    
  
It’s out of a deep, heart wrenching, and soul-crushing sense of grief. 

-

Ben is laying in a bed.    
  
He knows this place in his bones. It’s a place that hums in his soul. The ocean laps against the shore to the beat of his heart and the ocean breeze is more soothing than anything that he has ever felt in his life. Or his afterlife. Or whatever exactly this is at this point.    
  
Beside him in the bed is the girl, Rey. She’s naked, and her skin is glowing in the soft and warm sunlight. He expected her body to be soft, but it isn’t as she presses it against his. She is all hip bones and elbows and rib cages and muscle just hidden just below the surface of her skin. He admits that the bones are pressing into his own flesh, causing a pain that’s as sweet as anything that he has ever felt. 

  
He cups her face in his hands. He searches her face for a trace of anger or disgust, but he can not find any. She only looks at him with a sense of trust and longing. She loops her arms around his neck. Ben absentmindedly wondered if this is what it feels like to have a noose around your neck.    
  


“I love you,” he says softly. He pushes a brown lock of hair out of her face to reveal eyes that are bright with a spark that Ben wishes he could capture and keep forever. 

“I know,” she smiles cheekily, and he blushes in spite of himself.    
  
“Is this real?” He asks. It is a stubborn habit that has stuck with him throughout his life. He cannot somehow expect that he deserves something good.

“Oh, Ben.” Her eyes drop, and Ben closes his own. She tightens her arm around his neck, and the pressure is somewhat unpleasant. Ben almost feels like he’s drowning. “Of course this isn’t real.”   
  
Perhaps he could not escape his expectations for a reason.   
  


-

Ben is standing in a room.   
  
Despite the deep hold of the inky night, the room is excruciatingly hot. The heat continues to gnaw and grasp at his neck, and Ben swallows forcefully. A few feet away from him, the two members of the hut sleep soundly without moving.   
  
“Grandfather,” Ben breathes in deeply as he takes a step forward towards the duo. 

His eyes settle on the woman first. Despite the fact that she is sleeping, she looks exhausted. Her hair is tied away from her face in a severe, no-nonsense matter. Her dress is dirty and covered in sweat. Her arms are snaked around her son in an unfailing grip. 

Naturally, Ben then looks at the little boy in her grasp. He looks content in his sleep, the ghost of a smile still dancing across his lips. He gently rests his hands across his mother’s arms. His dark blonde hair brushed across his face. His grandfather, a man who has caused so much death and destruction and pain across the entire galaxy, is now just a little boy in his mother’s arms.    
  
There is a lightsaber in Ben’s hands.    
  
A dark thought enters his mind. He could end both of them now. Stop all of this in its tracks before it ever even begins. He could save thousands of lives, spare millions from pain.    
  
He looks down at his own body. Without his grandfather, he would cease to exist. His mother and his uncle would cease to exist. The Skywalkers would cease to exist. The Skywalker legacy would cease to exist.    
  
Ben wonders if that would be such a bad thing.    
  
The lightsaber is heavy in his hand. 

**Author's Note:**

> hey, y'all! like this fic? please rewatch the sequels, or maybe pacific rim 2, or attack the block, or anything with john boyega. he's an incredible actor in star wars, and he is out fighting for his rights and his life and the lives of thousands of people in the african diaspora across the world. 
> 
> please let's rally around him as star wars fans, especially if we are unable to support #BLM in some other more material ways.


End file.
